[ This description is from the project: MHS 225th Anniversary ]

In this letter to Horace Mann, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody described a young author of Salem, Mass. named Nathaniel Hawthorne. She praised Hawthorne's "first rate genius," but worried that "authorship does not seem to offer a means of living" for him. Mann and Hawthorne would later marry Peabody's sisters, Mary and Sophia.